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Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series is fast becoming a worthy successor to the seminal Schubert and Schumann Lieder sets on the label. This fourth volume features a veteran of these recordings, the great British baritone Christopher Maltman. Roger Vigno ...» More

A further instalment in Hyperion’s major series, skilfully masterminded by accompanist Roger Vignoles, introduces the American soprano Kiera Duffy. The highlight of this balanced recital is the coloratura Op 68 Brentano-Lieder, which owes its rich ...» More

From the distress that has savagely enchained me,
I have sought refuge, my child, in you,
That I might feast my heart and eyes
On your angelic joy,
On this innocence, this morning brightness,
This unsullied divine spring.

Auf ein Kind begins in emotional turmoil, represented by turbulent chromatics in the piano part. However these give way to increasingly diatonic harmonies, culminating in a divinely inspired C major and an ethereal vocal line that seems literally transported by the child’s God-given innocence of worldly cares.

If you stroll in the evening light
(That is the time for a poet’s rapture):
Always keep your face turned
To the glow of the setting sun!
Your spirit will soar in lofty solemnity,
You will gaze into the halls of the temple,
Where everything sacred is disclosed
And heavenly beings move up and down.

But when the dark clouds roll
Down around the sanctuary:
All is then accomplished, you turn back
Enraptured by the wonders you have seen.
You will walk with quiet emotion,
You will bear within you the blessing of the song;
The brightness that you have seen
Will shine softly about you on dark paths.

English: Richard Stokes

The exalted mood of Uhland’s poem invites, and here receives, the full wide-screen treatment. Over a gently undulating pulse in the bass, the piano’s right hand conjures the vastness of the evening sky in music of great power and vision. That Strauss had the orchestra in mind is evident, and he did indeed subsequently score it; and yet the piano version has great nobility, and in its orchestral imaginings a real sense of aspiring to the sublime.

I knelt transfixed at her grave
And plunged my spirit deep into death’s realm.
My gaze did not reach to heaven,
Images of reunion loomed distant and pale.
Since I found nothing but horror before me,
I fled to you, O bygone days;
I let the night of the coffin disappear,
And bore it back to beautiful life.

The pale eyelids began to open,
Her eyes looked up yearningly to me;
The freshly rejuvenated limbs reached up,
She floated radiantly in the sisters’ chorus;
The golden hours of love emerged once more,
With the joy of the first kiss,
Until her life and mine vanished
In the scent and morning glow of blessed childhood.

In Rückleben the poet grieves at his beloved’s graveside to dark, brooding chords in the piano’s lowest register: but in a reverie he imagines her rising from the grave, and living her life in reverse, her youth and beauty gradually restored and returning to the joy of their first kiss, a vision clothed by Strauss in a soaring triplet-borne melody akin to that of Des Dichters Abendgang. Like many another of Strauss’s visionary songs, it begins in one key but ends in another. Interestingly, the English poet Thomas Hardy explores the same idea in The Clock of the Years, a poem memorably set to music by Gerald Finzi; but in Hardy’s case the life-in-reverse is taken to its logical conclusion, erasing all trace of the beloved’s existence, to the singer’s bitter regret.

This is one of Strauss’s few settings of Uhland, and the only occasion on which he re-visited a text that he had set in his youth. That early version, composed at the age of eight, was a simple strophic setting in the spirit of Uhland’s deliberately homespun text. The mature composer however dresses it up in an altogether more sophisticated fashion. A rippling piano motif with implied cross-rhythms is juxtaposed with the more foursquare vocal line in a manner that tends to subvert the listener’s sense of form. But the musical concept has a naïve charm to it, and the repeated ‘Gesegnet’ of the last line contrives to wrap the whole up in a happy conclusion.

I know seven merry companions,
The thirstiest in these parts;
They swore by all that’s holy
Never to mention a certain word—
In no guise,
Neither loud nor soft.

The fine little word is water,
Which contains not an ounce of malice.
How come then that the wild gluttons
Are terrified by this simple word?
Pay attention! I’ll tell you
The strange story.

Those thirsty seven once heard tell
From an unknown drinking companion,
A new inn had just opened over there
In the wooded mountains,
Where aromatic wines
Flowed purely and freely.

Not one of the seven would have set out
To hear a good sermon preached:
But when it was a question of filling glasses,
The lads at once became excited.
‘Stand up, and let’s set out!’
Each one cries to the other.

They stride out vigorously with the dawn;
The sun soon shines with oppressive heat,
Their tongues are parched, their lips burn,
And from their brows the sweat runs down:
The stream ripples brightly
Down the mountainside.

How they drink it in huge gulps!
But hardly had they quenched their thirst
Than they all confirm their displeasure,
That water, not wine, flowed here:
Ah, insipid drink!
Ah, what a drab turn of events!

The forest now receives the pilgrims
In its many interwoven walks.
Sudden they stop, huddled in a throng,
Dense undergrowth halts their progress.
They get lost, they look for the way,
They quarrel and curse.

At almost seven minutes Von den sieben Zechbrüdern is one of Strauss’s longest songs, but goes by at an extreme pace, telling an amusing, cautionary tale about seven drinking companions who, hearing of a tavern serving exceptionally good wine, set off in search of it, but on the way get lost, first almost dying of thirst and then finding themselves drenched by rain and back where they started. Marked So schnell als möglich (‘as fast as possible’), and alternating a speedy 6/8 with a more ironically laid back 3/4, the hectic narrative makes virtuoso demands of the tenor, while affording the piano (in some of Strauss’s most brilliant and orchestral writing for the instrument) all kinds of illustrative detail, from rippling streams and crashing thunder to the white-hot chromatics of the scorching sun. After so much breathless activity, Strauss’s laconic little coda is a masterstroke.